Our Latest Posts About: Streaming

Not everyone is willing to pay for radio, especially casual listeners.

When Apple Radio launched, it was just like Pandora and iHeartRadio. It was a free music service that let people create their own custom "Stations" featuring their favorite kinds of music. Since the service was free, there were commercials, just like traditional radio.

For most casual users, the inclusion of a commercial every now and then was completely normal. After all, radio stations have been running commercials for almost 100 years.

However when Apple acquired Beats Music, they decided to change Apple Radio to a subscription model without commercials. This means that casual listeners like me who are unwilling to pay have no other choice but to use a competing service.

The key point is that

On-demand services are wonderful, but schedule programming is an EVENT.

I realize that the whole point of Netflix is that the entire service is on-demand, so you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want. That's all fine and dandy, but I think they should have scheduled programming too.

When I was in grade school, Tuesdays were special; that's when Happy Days came on. The next day, everyone in class talked about it. Although none of us watched it together, Tuesdays at 8m belonged to us. It was an event we all shared together.

That's what's missing from on-demand services like Netflix, an event. Now that they have original programming, they need to schedule specific times for first run episodes to run, so everyone in the country can watch at the same time. They ca... [More]

Sometimes the audio is all you need.

For those times when all you really need is the audio, it's a shame to waste all that bandwidth playing the video portion too. In fact, many people use YouTube just to listen to playlists of music videos. Unfortunately, in order to listen to the music, you need to keep the screen turned on, and you can't run another App without stopping the music.

Although Internet bandwidth is getting dirt cheap, it's not free, and videos drain batteries faster than audio alone. So, why give people the option to turn off the video portion and just listen to the audio?

The obvious reason they block people from playing audio in the background is so they can see the advertising. The fact is, people who use YouTube for music won't see the ads anywa... [More]

What are they waiting for?

One of the things holding Apple TV back from widespread use is the lack of support for Amazon Instant Video. While it's still a great way to play photos and videos from your phone, a lot of people buy it just to play streaming movies using services like Netflix. Now that Amazon Instant Video has a lot of original and exclusive programming, a lot of people are forced to purchase other devices, such as Roku because it works with all the biggest video streaming services.

The heart of the problem is that Apple doesn't like putting subscription services on Apple TV unless they get 30% of the revenue, but since the revenue for Amazon's Instant Video service is linked to Amazon Prime, which extends beyond just streaming videos, they have to way to quanti... [More]

* Note: The ideas on "Idea of the Day" were posted without any formal research into existing inventions.

In some cases, patents may already exist for these ideas, in other cases, there may not be any existing patents and you are free to develop and explore the viability of developing and patenting the ideas.

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